March 27, 2005

ambitious? yes. DELUDED? definitely!

Well, it's been a good run, but it's nearly over. My mom has been here since Tuesday evening, but she's leaving Monday morning and then I'll have to get back to full-time mom status. And, just to be clear, that's full-time mom to two young ones that do not appreciate seeing their mom at the computer during their waking hours. So the posts will once again slow to every few days, and although I still get to read many blogs while nursing, my 1-handed typing skills are such that commenting will be more difficult. Now, if Frankie did not prove to be such a grump every time I try using caffeine as an alternative to sleep, well then I might be able to replace some sleeping hours with more productive and enjoyable activities.

Here is my big big list of things I wanted to get done while she was here:

paint the basement playroom (OK, who was I kidding? That so was not going to get done. Still, it drives me nuts that the former owners of this house felt that gray was an appropriate color for a basement. Talk about your depression chamber...)

cut down the overgrowth from the garden that I did not get done last Fall (Who really does garden clean-up in the Fall? Isn't everybody just completely burned out with all the gardening stuff by the time cooler weather rolls around?)

mail off the donations for care packages for C.L.A.S.S. (Yes, they were asked for at the end of January, and they've just been sitting there in my laundry room since then, accusing me every time I hurried past without boxing them up and sending them on their way. If I didn't get this one done, I was going to have to give myself a swift kick.)

mail off stuff for Haley (Haley's a girl waiting for a liver transplant, while simultaneously dealing with Lupus. If you've not clicked the sidebar link to hear her singing her own self-composed song Dirty Rotten Liver Blues, then you are really missing something.)

finish gift for our good friends, Riley and Shelby and family. (This one is about halfway done, hence the halfway strikethrough.)

take a trip to the zoo in Chicago, and maybe manage to arrange a visit with Mary and Anna and family. (This one was actually a general "during Spring Break" kind of activity. So it might still get done if Joerg decides to take a day off from research/preparing the tenure case and just have fun with us.)

finish tribute essay for donor family (Done, and I'm fairly happy with the results. Now I'm trying to find someplace to publish it for National Donate Life Month in April.)

get everything prepared for next month's photo caption contest, again over at C.L.A.S.S. (This was a hugely fun project, although very time-consuming. Actually, I have to admit that composing the soundtrack for the slideshow movie I made to commemorate the event was the most time-consuming factor. And, really, I didn't have to do that. And, really, a different song probably would have been cuter. But, really, I worry about putting things in my University account that have even the whiff of copyright violation. So I'll either have to buy myself a public account with more space, or else continue to tinker out my own music with the prerecorded loops on GarageBand. If you're curious about the caption contest, here's the slideshow for March's event, featuring Brooke, transplanted 1 year ago. The slideshow even captures the little political tiff we liver parents had over the use of John Kerry for humorous purposes--like the rest of the country, the liver families were split on this issue.).

do laundry (should I even include this? I mean, it is actually an "every weekend" kind of thing. I guess I will because I need more things to be actually crossed off.)

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Falling Down, November 2004

Balloon in hand, my 4-year-old
twirled across the kitchen floor,
singing nonsense words
in her own key.
"It's my gift!" she declared
to the world at large, which
was really only me,
sitting at the table. Enough
twirling, and she lost
her balance, tumbling
to the floor in a theatrical
slapstick of elbows and knees.

She lay on her back
for a few seconds,
staring
at the textured ceiling
with the mysterious
spaghetti sauce stain.
Suddenly she
began
flapping her arms and legs
there on the floor, as if to swish
the imaginary snow
into a snow angel.